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I think you are supposed to come back from vacation feeling refreshed… right? I haven’t been this wiped out in a while.
Fate was working against my vacation the entire time. When making arrangements to get to and from the airport, I discovered that my return flight was wrong and had to get that fixed. Friday, I lost my itinerary at a gas station and had to call to get my confirmation number again (wait time was supposed to be 11 minutes so I figured I could just be away from my desk for a few… definitely waited 24). At about the time I was supposed to leave for the airport an accident involving a semi closed down I-40… at the airport… We found another way to get there, but a torrential rain started (fortunately we left an hour and a half before my flight). At the airport, going through security, they tell me I can’t have my shampoo, hair gel, tooth paste or shaving gel in my carry on (they were singularly and cumulatively over the limit of 3 fl. oz…. then again not much isn’t…) so I had to go back to check in, reorganize my bags since I had electronics in both carry ons and go through security again. After finally getting to the gate I discovered I’d also left my sun glasses at the check in counter… I gave those up as a loss to the Fates. Of course I would have had time since my flight was delayed for 2 and a half hours because of storms. The flight out was interesting to say the least. There was a minimum of 3 times that the plane hit an air pocket and fell a few hundred feet… yay…
Saturday was a lot of fun. The experiences of the night before and the lack of sleep gave me an annoyed demeanor, but we still had a lot of fun at the Renaissance Fair. (Pictures of me in a kilt will be on facebook sometime soon… maybe.) There was only one little bump: Matthew started throwing some fits later in the afternoon. It turns out though that he was up late the night before (since he had just come back from Hawaii) and up early the next day (to drive to my Dad’s) so I guess it is surprising that he really lasted to 5pm without throwing fits.
Sunday was nice. I spent the day with Theresa shopping around for new sandals (didn’t find any that I liked completely). We had dinner with my mom and Tim picked me up around 8. I spent most of Sunday night reformatting my computer and installing about 40GB of applications and such… not fun, but it had to be done (XP 64but just has too many compatibility problems). I figured we would leave around noon Monday, or at least early aftenoon. Turned out that Tim told everyone 4pm and we didn’t leave until 5:30. The drive to Dallas was interesting. On the way from Cinci to Louisville, Tim missed the 71/75 (it was a single lane split so not hard to miss), but we didn’t notice until we were too far south to really do anything so we caught 64W adding another hour and a half or so to the drive. We then had to do a little hunting for a friend of Mike’s in Louisville (not much, the directions were just a bit ambiguous). The drive was mostly ok after that, but as we crossed into Texas we got hit with a number of rainstorms slowing us down and stopping us from time to time getting us to Dallas about 2 hours later than we had to be there (for setup since 4 of us volunteered this year).
The actual convention was a lot of fun… and I think for the first year, no one got severely pissed off at anyone for the entire trip. I won’t go into the full details, because they’re boring to type out, but one big annoyance and something that was a lot of fun. The annoyance: While we were there, there were 2 volunteer prize drawings… both times Tim, Matt, and Steve won something and I did not even though I had more “points” than all 3 of them (I was really pissed after the 2nd drawing for like 4 hours). The something fun: Saturday night, a series of events unfolded that allowed me to somehow become something of a point man in an investigation to find a stolen PSP. We found the kid, confiscated anything he didn’t check in with, made him give back all of the free stuff had had gotten while there (including the shirt he was wearing), and blacklisted him from everything Quakcon (Given that I’m sure a number of other cons check our lists/forums, he is probably blacklisted from most of the big cons in America). I even had the person satisfaction of escorting the teen out the doors (cameras ablaze). The kid has been nicknamed “PSP Kid” and there are many pictures and photoshops of him around the internet. Less than 30 minutes after the event, there was even a wiki article about him created (which has since been removed).
The drive home sucked. Simply put, I was awake for the better part of 36 hours including the drive and my flight to NC (I did take a short nap at Theresa’s before the flight)… I really feel like I’ve been given a horse tranquilizer at the moment…
Thats enough for now… I’ll see what I can do about pictures.